By Our Correspondent
JAIPUR – With the communal passions being inflamed during the campaign for the upcoming Rajasthan Assembly election, all political parties in the state have ignored the issue pertaining to the Muslim community, which comprises about 10% of the population and wields influence in at least 40 of the 200 Assembly constituencies. There is a complete absence of debate on the concerns and problems of Muslims.
The principal opposition party, BJP, has included Hindu seers among its candidates and has not given the ticket to even a single Muslim as part of its calculated Hindutva design. Evidently, the BJP wants to be seen as opposed to Muslims in all of its acts. But the resolute silence on Muslim issues from the ruling Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and even the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is certainly baffling.
The Muslim community throughout the country, including Rajasthan, has been facing the wrath of Hindutva forces since the formation of the BJP government at the Centre in 2014. Several incidents of lynching of Muslims on the pretext of punishment for cow smuggling and cow slaughter have taken place in the state. Despite this, the security of the minority community is nowhere on the agenda of any of the mainstream parties.
The BJP, which has not fielded a single candidate from the Muslim community, had given a ticket at the last moment in the 2018 Assembly election to former Transport Minister Yunus Khan against Congress leader Sachin Pilot from Tonk. Khan lost to Pilot by a heavy margin of 54,179 votes and sought a ticket this time from his traditional constituency, Didwana. On being denied the ticket, Khan has broken ties with the BJP and is contesting as an independent candidate from Didwana.
The BJP’s decision to field Hindu seers from three Muslim-dominated seats has been perceived as an attempt to polarise the voters, which is expected to benefit the party in the long run. In Pokhran falling in the border district of Jaisalmer, during the last Assembly polls, just 872 votes separated the winner from the defeated candidate, and a seer is now pitted against the son of a Muslim religious leader.
BJP candidate Mahant Pratap Puri, who is the religious head of the Taratara Math in Barmer district, is pitted against Saleh Mohammed of Congress, who is the representative of Peer Pagaro, a religious head of Sindhi Muslims in Pakistan, after the death of his father Ghazi Fakeer. The competition between the two candidates is going to be tough, but the BJP expects to benefit from polarisation.
Similarly, Hawa Mahal in Jaipur is a Muslim-dominated seat, but the Congress has not fielded a Muslim face in the constituency for the last three elections. The BJP has fielded Balmukund Acharya and the Congress has fielded R.R. Tiwari. The Aam Aadmi Party fielded Pappu Qureshi, but the party leadership convinced him and he announced that he would extend support to the Congress candidate.
In Alwar district’s Tijara, Alwar MP Mahant Balaknath has been fielded by the BJP against Imran Khan of the Congress. The Congress has fielded Imran Khan, who was earlier given the ticket by the BSP. He changed his party overnight and became a Congress candidate.
The Congress has fielded a total of 15 Muslim candidates in the Assembly election, which was the same number of candidates given tickets in the previous election in 2018. The candidates are Rafiq Khan from Jaipur’s Adarsh Nagar, Amin Kagzi from Jaipur’s Kishanpol, Zakir Hussain from Makrana, Hakam Ali from Fatehpur, Wajib Ali from Nagar, Saleh Mohammed from Pokhran, Zahida Khan from Kaman, Imran Khan from Tijara, Zuber Khan from Ramgarh, Shahzad Khan from Soorsagar, Amin Khan from Shiv, Naseem Akhtar from Pushkar, Danish Abrar from Sawai Madhopur, Rafiq Mandelia from Churu and Naeemuddin Guddu from Kota’s Ladpura.
Malnutrition and lack of quality education are among the major challenges confronting Muslims in the state, as a huge section of them lives below the poverty line. The majority of Muslims support Congress during elections, though all Muslim candidates of the party had lost in 2013, while in 2018, seven of the 15 Muslim candidates from the party were elected. The BJP had fielded four candidates from the community in 2013, of whom two won. Yunus Khan was the sole Muslim candidate of the BJP in 2018.
A shocking case this time was that of Abhishek Singh, whose name was initially announced as the BJP candidate from Masuda constituency in Ajmer district. Later, a whisper campaign started among the BJP-RSS cadres that Singh belonged to one of the Muslim sects found in the Ajmer-Mehrat region, who were recent converts from Hindus. As this whisper campaign gathered momentum, his name was struck out from the list of candidates. This happened even as Singh went on reiterating that he was a practising Hindu and a descendant of the Rajput king Prithviraj Chauhan.
The BJP’s decision to totally leave out Muslims is part of its election strategy. It not only helps to consolidate its position among the Hindus in the Hindu majority state, where they are 88.49% of the population but also allows continuing the party’s tirade against the community. In line with this strategy, Muslim terror and the ongoing Israel-Hamas war are hot topics in the election discourse, which the BJP has tried to push in the state.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a speech at an election rally in Udaipur, termed the Congress government in Rajasthan as “sympathiser of terrorists”. A few days back at a rally in support of Mahant Balaknath, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath raised the issue of “Jihadi terror” and spoke at length about the Gaza conflict amid the loud clapping by the audience.
Surprisingly, there has been no reaction from those who are expected to counter such a narrative, when systematic attempts are being made with impunity to brand and run down the minority community. No one seems to be questioning the BJP. No media house, no Opposition party, including the Congress at the national level, posed any questions to the BJP in this regard. Not even the Muslim organizations in the State have initiated any debate on the outright exclusion of the community by the BJP.
Congress reaches the throne of power only with the help of Muslim voters, but when it comes to the share of Muslims, Congress pulls out its hand. Be it about local body polls or about tickets for Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, every time a Muslim feels cheated, according to the political observers in Rajasthan. The slogan “the greater the number, the greater the share”, becomes a lip service when it comes to Muslims.
Waqar Ahmed, Welfare Party of India’s state president, says that since according to the 2011 census, Rajasthan has a 10% Muslim population, the Congress should have ideally given tickets to 20 Muslims, but it has fielded only 15 candidates. Ahmed said the Congress had come to power in 2018 with the votes of Muslims, but no action was taken on the ground for their welfare during the last five years. No significant political appointments were made from the community and the last-minute appointments to the Muslim bodies such as Waqf Board and Madrasa Board were made in a perfunctory manner.
With every political party seeming to avoid giving political share to Muslims in proportion to their population, the neglect of 10% of the population can have disturbing consequences for society. Muslims may start thinking that they are being ignored, sidelined, and discriminated against in the country. This will be harmful to the social fabric of India, where secularism has had deep roots for hundreds of years.
